I am used to leading two kinds of photography workshops: one is close enough to my home base in Berkeley so it is easy to set up the workshop room in advance, the other is under the auspices of an institution where I am not responsible for setup. Last weekend’s Black and White in San Francisco workshop was a hybrid, in other words a kind of cross between the two.

We rented a really very nice space in the heart of San Francisco’s Chinatown as the home base for the event. This turned out to be a great idea, but there was really no way we could setup in advance. In thinking how I could get everything I needed over to the workshop from the parking garage, I hit on the idea of encapsulating it in the suitcase I use traveling. This led to the workshop in a suitcase, possibly a relative of the great monologist Spalding Gray’s Monster in a Box.

Thanks to the participants in this workshop for being a great and game group despite the rain in Saturday. We had fun in a variety of locations. I photographed the Golden Gate Bridge and Fort Point (top) and Baker and China Beaches from Fort Point (above) in foul weather on Saturday, and used the images in classroom black and white conversion demos.

The sepia image of the eternal city (Rome) shown above was a classroom demonstration, with the file drawn from my recent trip to Italy. The box of prints shown below was contained as part of my monster, er, workshop in a suitcase. This was a great workshop and location. We will probably but it on rotation for a repeat sometime in the next 12-18 months, and you might not want to miss it both in terms of the photography and the hands-on demos of monochromatic conversion techniques. You can keep tabs on my workshop schedule by visiting my Workshops & Events page.